Who We Are Instead, page 28
“I’ll miss you.”
“I know.” I make myself stand, my legs wobbling. I take the purple lighter out of my pocket and set it gently on the end table. I don’t look at him, don’t look at anything. I turn and walk carefully down the porch steps.
The sun rising above the treetops burns away the fog. It shines too brightly. It should be raining, pouring, the sky as gray and cold as my grief-stricken heart. But it isn’t.
Everywhere around me, the beginning of May signals new life. The jeweled greens of new leaves and lush grass. The hazy blues of a sky quilted with clouds. The yellows of daffodils and dandelions, the purple of violets and the delicate white of Queen Anne’s Lace. I should feel brand new, reborn, alive with second chances.
But I don’t. I feel like I’m drowning. I know this is right. I know I can’t be with Felix. I’m not ready. I’m not okay. I can’t fix us because I’m the one that’s broken. I’m broken and I need to be fixed. No. I need to fix myself.
I climb in the car and drive away. My vision blurs. My heart plunges into an ocean of pain. I gasp for air. My lungs are suffocating.
I’m drowning.
I don’t know how to swim.
45
Lena
I knock on Lux’s bedroom door.
“Come in,” Lux says.
She’s been back from the hospital for almost three weeks. Long enough for the tremors to stop, the sunken gray color of her skin to fade. Long enough for us both to be ready, finally, to talk.
Lux is lying on her bed, earbuds hooked in her ears, working on one of her origami pieces. She’s only got a few points completed, but the star is already forming beneath her fingers, the paper a rich, shimmery gold. Her cat is curled into a furry ball in a nest of her hair.
“How’re you feeling?”
Lux lifts her shoulders. “I’ve been worse.”
“Good, I guess.” I clear my throat. “I was hoping maybe we could talk.”
An expression I can’t read passes over her face. Lux yanks her hair out from beneath Phoenix, sits up, and swings her legs over the bed. Phoenix leaps to her feet, hissing and spitting. Her yellow eyes are trained on me, her gray fur standing on end along the ridge of her spine.
“I think she hates me.”
Lux hovers her hand over the cat’s back. “It’s okay,” she murmurs. Slowly, her hackles lower. Her hiss dwindles to a low growl in her throat.
“I do believe you’re actually taming that thing.”
Lux smiles weakly. She’s dressed in the green striped flannel PJs I got her for Christmas the last time I was home. She’s not wearing any make-up, and her unwashed red hair hangs lank around her face and shoulders. She looks unbearably young.
“How about I make Dad’s homemade hot chocolate?”
Lux attempts another smile, but it slides right off her face. “Comfort food at its best.”
“Yeah.”
Lux gets up slowly, as if a great weight is attached to her spine. She cradles the half-finished star in one hand and follows me into the kitchen. She slumps at the table.
I wipe my palms on my jeans and open the cupboard, pulling down two pans. I grab the Ghirardelli dark chocolate bar and the milk from the fridge. “I’m trying not to be judgmental,” I say to the counter, suddenly unable to meet my sister’s gaze.
I will be understanding. I will not flinch from her spikes. I will take the pain. Because I love her. Because she’s all I have left. If we can’t save each other, then we’re both lost. “I’m going to try my best to just listen.”
“That’d be a first.”
I add whole milk, cinnamon, sugar, and vanilla into the pan and simmer, stirring the whole time. Stay calm. I must stay calm. Things already seem like they could blow up any second, and we haven’t even started yet. “What do you mean?”
“You never listen, Lena. You always judge. You’ve decided how things are before I even open my mouth. What’s even the point?”
I try to remember Eli’s advice. What would he do? “I may have behaved that way in the past—”
“You always do.”
I grit my teeth as I break up the chocolate bar and add it to the double boiler. “That doesn’t seem fair.”
“No?” Lux’s gaze crackles, burning holes in my back. “You think you know everything, up there on your marble pedestal. You’re all pompous and justified, judging everyone else for their mistakes.”
“Now, wait just a minute. That’s unfair—”
“Is it? You stew in your self-righteousness, Lena. It’s what you do. You think you have everybody and everything figured out, but you don’t. You never even ask. Not really, not like you actually want to know. You never even tried to talk to me unless you were telling me what to do. You never tried to understand.”
The pain radiating off her is palpable. I bite my tongue so hard I taste coppery blood. I will not respond. I will not be defensive. I will listen. “I didn’t know you felt that way.”
“You won’t talk to me,” she says again. “You never even tried.”
“I’m trying now, Lux,” I say, glancing back at her.
She folds the gold paper, twisting it this way and that. Her fingers move deftly, making diamond and triangle folds, shaping a form she already knows in her heart, in her bones.
I whisk the chocolate into the milk. “This isn’t easy for me. But I’m trying. I’m here.”
She just looks at me.
“We only have each other. If we don’t figure this out . . .”
She sighs. “I know.”
“You talk, and I’ll listen. I won’t judge you, I promise.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“The truth.”
“You don’t want to know. Trust me.”
I hand Lux a mug and move to the kitchen table. I cup my hands around the hot mug and breathe in the steam. I keep my voice even, relaxed. “We’ve had enough secrets in this family to last a lifetime. Maybe we should try something else this time.”
“I screwed up. Is that what you want to hear?”
“Just tell me what happened. Start with Dad’s heart attack.”
“Fine. Whatever.” Lux stares down at her mug, her mouth taut. Half-moons of fatigue darken the skin beneath her eyes. “We fought about everything. What were we fighting about that night? I don’t even remember. Something about what I was wearing. He’d gone all religious all of a sudden, quoting the Bible at me. I couldn’t stand it. He was the last person in the world to be getting all high and mighty. I said things.”
“What did you say?”
Lux shakes her head. Her eyes take on a far-away, glazed look. “I shouted, screamed at him. I said he was a home-wrecker and a hypocrite. I said he had no right to say anything about what was right or wrong because I knew what he did, I knew he’d done the worst possible thing. I said he killed Mom.”
I suck in my breath. But I don’t speak. I listen.
Lux keeps talking. “I didn’t even notice for a minute. I just kept screaming at him. He kinda slipped down against the wall. He grabbed his arm and made these hitching sounds in his throat, like he couldn’t talk. Then his eyes were still open, but they weren’t looking at anything. I freaked. I called 911. I couldn’t stand it, waiting there with him like that. I couldn’t do it. I was so scared that he was dead, that I’d killed him.”
“So you left him.”
“I left. I had to. I didn’t know what else to do. You never would’ve left. I know that.” Bitterness spikes her voice. “You’re the perfect daughter. You would’ve done everything right, just like you always do.”
“I didn’t—”
“I know what I did, okay? I’d give anything to take it all back if I could.”
“You never talked to Dad.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. I always meant to go in there, to talk to him, but why would he ever want to see me again? He should’ve hated me. He didn’t though, and that just made it worse. I got scared and I ran away. I got scared and I let Dad die without ever saying I’m sorry.”
“He wanted to see you.”
She makes a choked, strangled sound in the back of her throat. “I know.”
“You acted like you didn’t care.”
“I couldn’t—it’s hard to explain. It was too big, like something big and dark about to swallow me whole. I just couldn’t . . . I did what I always do. I screw up everybody’s lives and run away and hide, and then I try to fix things when it’s too late. That’s my life story.”
“You could’ve talked to me.”
Lux’s eyes are raw and red-rimmed. Her face is drained of color. “Yeah right. At least I know what I am. I know you hate me. I deserve to be hated. It’s not like I could ever say something that would change that.”
Tenderness creeps through, first small and light and then stronger, and faster, filling me up. “I’ve never hated you.”
“All I’ve ever been to you is trouble. I’m a screw-up, always have been. You had to leave your scholarship to take care of Dad, and I couldn’t even talk to him.”
I left her alone. I got to leave, to escape, to chase my dreams. She was stuck here, alone in this house haunted with memories. She and Dad both trying to flee a past they couldn’t acknowledge. “Lux, I—”
“Maybe it was better if Dad could pretend all he had was you,” Lux says. “That’s what I told myself. Then he died and I missed my chance. And I didn’t plan to miss the funeral, but guess what? I managed to eff that up too.”
Her words bleed together. She hiccups, struggling to keep the sobs at bay. Her fingers quiver as she twists the paper in her hands, folding and unfolding, creasing and uncreasing. “That night, when I realized I missed the funeral . . . It’s not like there was any reason to have me around. I ruin everything I touch.”
Something shakes loose inside me, rattles around inside my bones. I jump to my feet, grab the hand towel next to the sink, and bring it to her. “You really felt that way?”
Lux buries her face in the towel. Her shoulders jerk and heave. “I still do,” she says into the cloth.
My heart bursts open. I crouch down beside her and wrap my arms around my sister. Lux stiffens. “I didn’t know. I wish you’d told me.”
Lux pulls away. Tears leak down her cheeks, snot bubbling in her nose. “You wouldn’t have listened. You wouldn’t have heard me.”
I want to yell, That’s not true, but I can’t. I know I can’t. I feel Lux’s absolute loneliness, her isolation, her prison of self-loathing and regret. “I’m listening now.”
“When it’s too late,” Lux says, blowing her nose into the towel. She rubs her eyes and cheeks with her fists.
I shake my head. We’ve lost so much. But not everything. Not yet.
This is what I know: sometimes you need to let go. Let go of the anger and the bitterness. Let go of the fantasy of a perfect life, a perfect mother. Let go of the idea that people are better than they are.
And sometimes you need to hold on. Hold on to hope in the face of despair. Hold on to love despite the disappointments, the betrayals, the bone-crushing pain. Hold on to family, even when it seems like they’re the ones leaving you.
The trick is knowing which is which. The trick is figuring out when to let go, when to hold on, and how to tell the difference. Maybe that’s part of growing up. Maybe it’s just part of being out in the world, choosing to live with your heart wide open.
“Not for us,” I say. “It’s not too late for us.”
Lux closes her eyes. “You say that because you don’t know it all. What happened with Dad—that’s not even the worst thing. You might not hate me now, but you will.”
I sit back in my chair. I get that feeling, that black prickling energy that comes to me sometimes in the darkroom when I’m near to something, when I know I almost have it right, am so excruciatingly close to discovering something new and brilliant and maybe a little bit treacherous. “What do you mean?”
“I’m talking about Mom,” Lux says in a voice aching with misery. “It was me. I’m the reason she killed herself.”
46
Lux
This is it. There’s no going back now. Only forward, into the savage unknown. This is me, cracked wide open. This is me, raw and skinless.
I’m utterly terrified.
I stare at my sister. She stares back at me. “Tell me,” she says.
How can I? How can I share everything I haven’t been able to say for years? Haven’t said. Have been afraid to. I want. I need. I’m scared.
I do this, or the black hole sucks me in. I do this or I explode. Dissolve into dark matter. I’ll be gone, only the reflected light of an already dead star.
Like Mom.
The memories are honed steel, sharp as razor-edged claws. They take hold and drag me back.
I was nine years and two months old that day in October, when I found the letter. The wind sheared the red and yellow leaves from the trees, hurling them through the air and slapping them against the windows. The leaves were wet and stuck to the glass like brightly colored stars.
Lena was gone for the afternoon, on a field trip to a museum in Grand Rapids. Mom was home, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the newspaper opened in front of her. She wasn’t reading it. Her eyes were glassy and unfocussed when she looked at me. My stomach knotted uneasily. Still, I asked her to play.
“Not now,” she said, even though she wasn’t even doing anything. If Lena had asked her, she would’ve said yes. She always said yes to Lena.
I escaped to the closet, where I started rummaging through the pockets of Dad’s jackets. He had two: a bright blue windbreaker and an old, greasy green flannel one Mom was always harping on him to throw away. The flannel jacket was his favorite, but it was the windbreaker he took when he left three days ago on another long haul. I liked the feel of the worn flannel and the faint scent of cologne, sweat, and gasoline.
“You took things out of his pockets,” Lena interrupts. Her brow furrows. “You took things from us. Mom’s ceramic box in your closet. It’s filled with stuff you stole. My pearl earring from that last Christmas.”
Heat creeps up my neck, but I don’t look away. “Yes.”
I expect her to get all red and furious, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t ask why. It’s like she knows already. Her lips press together, but she nods for me to continue.
I counted the handful of change in the right pocket of Dad’s coat: two quarters, thirteen pennies, three nickels. In his left pocket, my hand closed around a neatly folded sheet of paper. I sat cross-legged on the carpet and read the swirly handwriting. I was only nine, but I knew. “It was a love letter,” I say aloud. “A love letter addressed to Dad, to ‘Jacob, my love.’ Signed ‘Forever Yours, M.G.’”
A shadow passes across Lena’s face. She doesn’t look surprised. “What did it say?”
I make another petal fold, my fingers shaking so hard I can barely burnish the crease. “It said she loved him. She talked about him leaving Mom, about building a new family. They were making plans. I knew that meant we wouldn’t be a family anymore. It was Mom’s fault.”
The letter was worn around the edges, well creased and softened with the oil of many fingerprints. They hadn’t used messaging or email, either assuming hard copies were safer or just caught up in the romance of it, who knows. But he’d held that paper a hundred times if not a thousand. I imagined him on those long, lonely nights on the road. Sitting up so high in his big rig, pausing to pull out the letter, gently cradling it in his hands. Reading and rereading the feminine, loopy script.
The knot in my gut turned into a ball of snarled steel. It was like a giant hand twisting up my insides, turning them inside out. My fury wasn’t aimed at Dad. It was aimed at Mom. She was the one always apologizing, always begging for our forgiveness. She must’ve done something to make Dad so desperate to leave us. She did this. It was her fault.
I walked down the hallway with the unfolded letter clutched in my fist. I entered the kitchen and went straight to Mom. She was bent over the newspaper, her hair dull and snarled around her bony shoulders. I thrust the paper in front of her.
Looking back, it doesn’t make sense. I hoarded the bent paper clips and used gum wrappers I’d stolen from Dad like precious treasures, hiding them away so no one would find them. The letter, my most dangerous secret—I simply gave it to her. The ‘why’ is a black ink spot staining my mind. An oily darkness swirling beneath my consciousness. Did I seriously want to hurt her that badly? Was my heart that bent, that cruel? My greatest sin, and I didn’t even think twice about it.
“What did Mom do?” Lena asks. Her expression is unreadable, hard as stone.
I close my eyes. “It wasn’t as bad as you think. Not then.”
Mom read the letter several times, her gaze jerking over the words, her fingers white, the blue vein in her forehead pulsing. I stood in front of her, hands limp at my sides. I looked out the kitchen window at the trees losing their leaves, the golden stalks of corn bending in the wind.
Mom asked, “Where did you get this?”
I told her.
“Just now?”
“Yes, Momma.”
She smoothed the letter in one hand and tapped the newspaper with her finger. “How apt,” she said in a strange voice. “My horoscope for today says, ‘You must widen your horizons and change your perspective to see where you need to go. You must open yourself up to do what is needed to move on.’ Do you see? The stars always know.”
“What’s mine say, Momma?”
“Go to your room now.” Her smile was too wide and too bright, almost grotesque in its falseness.
I obeyed. I hummed the My Little Ponies theme song and dismantled my Lego castle. I brushed the manes of my Breyer horses, lining them up side by side on my dresser. I folded a crane out of buttery yellow paper and set it on my nightstand. The house descended into an eerie silence.
I don’t know what thoughts winged inside my mother’s head. Something shifted inside her, a critical tipping point. In its insidious silence, its invisibility, it was the most dangerous thing of all.
